If you have spent more than ten minutes tracking cyber security issues in this country you know that if there is a Snidely Whiplash in this business it’s the Chinese. If it’s not the government its “patriotic hackers,” or some variation on those themes. The argument over “APT” rages on (is it a ‘who?’ Is it a ‘what?’) and while not clearly labeled “Chinese” we now have “adversaries” to worry about.
Let me just state unequivocally: No one cares.

Rarely do you talk to someone at the C-level – someone who has profits and Wall Street and the Board on his mind – who cares about who his adversary is or what their motivations are. The occasional former military officer-turned-executive will have a flash of patriotic fervor, but then the General Counsel steps up and the flag would be furled. In the end the course of action they all approve is designed to make the pain go away: get the evil out of the network, get the hosts back online, and get everyone back to work. I haven’t talked to every executive about this issue, so your mileage may vary, but one only need read up on the hack-and-decline of Nortel understand what the most common reaction to “someone is intentionally focused on stealing our ideas,” is in the C-suites of American corporations.

This is not a new problem. You have never, ironically, heard of d’Entrecolles. American industrial might wasn’t a home-grown effort: we did the same thing to our cousins across the pond. Nortel is only a recent example of a worst-case industrial espionage scenario playing out. Ever heard of Ellery Systems? Of course you haven’t.

IP theft is not a trivial issue, but any number of things can happen to a given piece of IP once it is stolen. The new owners may not be able to make full or even nominally effective use of the information; the purpose or product they apply the IP to has little or nothing to do with what the IP’s creators are using it for; the market the new owner is targeting isn’t open to or pursued by the US; or in the normal course of events, what made the IP valuable at the point of compromise might change making it useless or undesirable by the time its new owners bring it to market.

More to the point: Our business culture does not demand anything beyond financial performance in the short term. The person responsible for a bad security decision today will have cashed out long before any consequences of IP theft are felt by the victim corporation.

Companies that suffer the fate of Ellery and Nortel are notable because they are rare. Despite the fact that billions in IP is being siphoned off through the ‘Net, there is not a corresponding number of bankruptcies. That’s not a defense; merely a fat, juicy data point supporting the argument that if the fate of the company is not in imminent danger, no one is going to care that maybe, some day, when certain conditions are met, last week’s intrusion was the first domino to fall.

If you are honestly interested in abating the flow of IP out of this country, your most effective course of action should be to argue in a context that business will not only understand but be willing to execute. Arguing Us vs. Them to people who are not in the actual warfighting business is a losing proposition. The days of industry re-orienting and throwing their weight behind a “war” effort are gone. “More security” generally comes at the expense of productivity, and that is a non-starter. Security done in a fashion that adds value – or at the very least does not serious impede the ability to make money – has the potential to be a winner.

I say ‘has the potential’ because to be honest you can’t count on business decision-makers caring about security no matter how compelling your argument. Top marks if remember the security company @Stake. Bonus points if you remember that they used to put out a magazine called Secure Business Quarterly that tried to argue the whole security-enabling-business thing. Did you notice I said “remember” and “used to?”

We have to resign ourselves to the very real possibility that there will never be an event so massive, so revealing, that security will be a peer to other factors in a business decision. While that’s great for job security, it also says a lot about what society values in the information age.